Skip to content

CLI-anything

CLI-anything is a bundled skill that lets the agent drive real desktop applications (GIMP, Blender, LibreOffice, Audacity, and two dozen others) from the command line, on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You describe the task ("convert report.docx to PDF", "resize photo.jpg to 1920×1080"). The agent picks the right app, installs it if it's missing, runs it, and reports the result. You never name the app, and you never run a command yourself.

Disabled by default

CLI-anything ships in the disabled_skills list of app/config/skills_config.json. Turn it on with /skill enable cli-anything or in Settings → Skills. Once enabled, it activates automatically whenever a task matches a supported app. Like any enabled skill, it also gets a /cli-anything slash command.

What it can automate

Each app is driven through a cross-platform harness command, cli-anything-<app>, so the agent never touches platform-specific binaries or paths:

Task App Harness
Resize / crop / filter / convert images GIMP cli-anything-gimp
SVG and vector graphics, logo export Inkscape cli-anything-inkscape
Digital painting, .kra export Krita cli-anything-krita
DOCX / XLSX / PPTX → PDF, office macros LibreOffice cli-anything-libreoffice
Trim / convert / export audio Audacity cli-anything-audacity
Render and edit video Kdenlive, Shotcut cli-anything-kdenlive, cli-anything-shotcut
Screen recording and streaming OBS Studio cli-anything-obs
3D modeling and rendering, .blend files Blender cli-anything-blender
Diagrams (.drawio) Draw.io cli-anything-draw-io
Render Mermaid diagram code Mermaid cli-anything-mermaid
AI image generation Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI cli-anything-stable-diffusion, cli-anything-comfyui
Run a local LLM Ollama cli-anything-ollama
AI content generation AnyGen cli-anything-anygen
AI research / PDF summarization NotebookLM cli-anything-notebooklm
Execute Jupyter notebooks JupyterLab cli-anything-jupyterlab
CAD, .fcstd → STL/STEP FreeCAD cli-anything-freecad
GIS maps, .qgz export QGIS cli-anything-qgis
Monitoring dashboards Grafana cli-anything-grafana
Git hosting, repo creation Gitea, GitLab cli-anything-gitea
CI/CD pipelines Jenkins cli-anything-jenkins
Cloud file sync NextCloud cli-anything-nextcloud
Network-wide ad blocking AdGuard Home cli-anything-adguard-home
Video conferencing Zoom cli-anything-zoom
Knowledge outlines Mubu cli-anything-mubu

Ask the agent "what can cli-anything do" and it replies with this catalogue directly, without running anything.

How routing works

The skill's instructions (skills/cli-anything/SKILL.md) contain a routing table mapping task descriptions to apps. When the skill is enabled and your request matches ("convert this DOCX", "render this .blend file") the agent selects the app and follows a fixed execution flow:

  1. Detect the OS (Windows / macOS / Linux).
  2. Check the app is installed (gimp --version and equivalents).
  3. Install it if missing, one attempt only, via the platform's package manager: winget on Windows, brew on macOS, apt-get on Linux. A few apps use their own path instead (ComfyUI and Stable Diffusion via git clone, Mermaid via npm, JupyterLab via pip, Ollama on Linux via its install script; web apps like Mubu and NotebookLM need no install and are driven through the browser-automation skill).
  4. Check the harness (cli-anything-<app> --version); if missing, install cli-anything-hub via pip and pull the harness with cli-hub install <app>. If the hub fails, the agent generates a minimal harness itself.

  5. Run the task using only harness commands, for example:

    cli-anything-gimp image resize input.jpg output.jpg 1920 1080
cli-anything-libreoffice convert doc.docx output.pdf
cli-anything-blender render scene.blend --output frames/ --format PNG

  6. Report in a sentence or two: what was produced and where.

Every step runs as a shell action, so you can watch the whole flow (version checks, installs, the task command) in the task panel, and it all lands in logs.

The skill hard-bans the failure modes of driving desktop apps directly: no .exe suffixes, no hardcoded C:\Program Files\... paths, no && command chaining, no raw soffice/gimp/blender invocations. The harness resolves app locations and flags per platform, which is what makes the same task work on all three OSes.

Python fallback

CLI-anything is the first choice, not the only one. If a harness command fails after one retry, the agent falls back to a pure-Python route (PIL for images, python-docx for documents, pydub for audio, moviepy for video), completes the task anyway, and tells you what it actually used (with a note that installing the app gives better results next time). Installs are never retried, timeouts are never looped on, and after repeated failures on one step the agent stops and reports rather than spinning.

Requirements

  • Enable the skill (see the note above). It does nothing while disabled.
  • Action sets: the skill declares shell and file_operations. It works through ordinary shell actions, no extra plumbing.
  • A package manager for auto-install: winget (Windows), Homebrew (macOS), or apt (Linux, where installs run under sudo). pip is needed for the harness hub.
  • Internet access the first time any given app or harness is installed.
  • File paths: give the agent full paths to input files (C:\Users\you\Desktop\photo.jpg, /home/user/photo.jpg) for the smoothest run.

It installs software

By design, this skill can install real applications on your machine (silently, with license agreements auto-accepted) and run them with your privileges. Each install is a visible shell action in the task panel, and installs are attempted at most once. If you don't want the agent installing anything, keep the skill disabled or preinstall the apps you care about.